NEW YORK — In August 1969, as hundreds of thousands flocked to the Woodstock music festival, a New York City rabbi drove to the site, hoping to engage with Jewish hippies.

At the festival, the rabbi set up a sign advertising “P.O.T. — L.S.D.” In small print below, the placard said, “Put on tefillin. Let’s start davening,” referring to phylacteries and Jewish prayer.

The Jewish visual artist Steve Marcus heard the possibly apocryphal story while studying at yeshiva. The anecdote inspired an illustration by Marcus showing a grinning man, sporting a Star of David and sidelocks and flashing a peace sign, reflecting Marcus’s mix of psychedelic-era counterculture and Jewish tradition.

The image is part of a trippy new exhibit in New York City by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Center for Jewish History. The exhibit, called “Psychedelicatessen: A Powerful Dose of Art by Steve Marcus,” blends 1960s and 1970s counterculture with Jewish themes, based in Marcus’s youthful psychedelic bent and midlife turn toward Jewish observance.

The free show at YIVO and the Center for Jewish History’s shared building in downtown Manhattan opened this month and runs through December. The exhibit displays 30 original works by Marcus, from images reminiscent of 1960s psychedelic poster art and album covers to reworked comic strips and caricatures.

The playful images include homages to the Daf Yomi daily Talmud study practice, the Slivovitz brandy associated with Ashkenazi Passovers, and historic rabbis like Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides — all with a psychedelic flavor.

Marcus said he hopes the exhibit will invite visitors of all persuasions to engage not only with the art, but with each other, in line with his own personal experiences.

He described a recent chance encounter when he was walking in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with a friend, a tattooed MMA fighter, and ran into another friend, an Orthodox rabbi. He introduced the unlikely pair to each other.

“Now, I’ll hear from my [fighter] friend, ‘Hey, I just ran into your rabbi.’ And my rabbi will let me know, ‘Hey, I ran into your friend,’” he said. “Art and creativity should bring people together. Global hegemony is terrible — it’s the differences that make the world a less boring place.”

In a similar vein, Marcus’s art career has connected him with a range of collaborators, from established museums and rock stars to psychedelic pioneers and subversive poets.

His hand-drawn works hang in several permanent museum collections, including The Jewish Museum of........

© The Times of Israel